Today I was asked to troubleshoot an executable that didn’t work correctly on Windows XP Embedded.

On startup it displayed the following message:

I verified that System.Configuration.dll was present (in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727).

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I was just browsing through the Options tab in Excel 2010 when I noticed the following setting:

This feature was introduced in Excel 2007.
In the default settings, multi-threaded calculation is Enabled with "Use all processors on this computer".

On a physical desktop this would be the preferred setting since it will make formula calculation as fast as possible.

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This morning Arjan Beijer sent me an interesting link to a youtube video about obtaining the Citrix IMA Datastore password using Windbg.

The video shows a method, discovered by Denis Gundarev to obtain the IMA Datastore password. Basically he uses DSMaint.exe and set’s a breakpoint on the call to CryptUnprotectData and then reads the password from memory.

I tried to call the CryptUnprotectData API with the data read from the registry directly but this failed with error NTE_BAD_KEY_STATE, this is defined in winerror.h and it means “Key not valid for use in specified state”.

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Just a small post today: a small commandline utility that reads the “DefaultPassword” LSA secret.

This secret is stored in the registry under the SECURITY Hive:

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After figuring out how to encode and decode the Citrix passwords my next step for the upcoming Citrix Launcher is experiment with config.xml and authenticating to the Citrix Web Interface.

I imported the NFuse.dtd from the Citrix Web Interface into Delphi with the XML Data Binding Wizard. The results in an NFuse Unit so I can easily create the XML data.

To create an authentication packet I use the following code:

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I am working on a launcher tool for Citrix XenApp that can not only connect to a published application or published desktop but can also leverage Citrix Workspace Control to reconnect to disconnected and/or active sessions.

There doesn’t seem to be any sdk that exposed the data we need so I am trying to reproduce what the Citrix online plugi-in does.

I used a HTTP monitoring tool to capture the traffic between the Online plug-in and the Web Interface. First the online plug-in will retrieve the config.xml from the server specified via the Change Server option:

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For a research project I tried to install Windows NT 4 Terminal Server on VMWare Workstation (version 8).

The setup would always fail however with the following error:

Obviously the installation doesn’t really fail because of too little memory and neither is the installation disc (an iso file) corrupt, it’s a bug.

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I needed to dome some Bit Shifting in PowerShell but unfortunately PowerShell lacks operator for Bit Shifting. I searched the .NET Framework for anything that allows for bit shifting but was unable to find anything suitable.

I didn’t want to revert to C# so I implemented shift left and shift right functions in PowerShell.

The code isn’t really pretty and could probably be improved (comments/improvements are welcome!) but here goes (please note that I implemented for bit shifting a byte):

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A user reported that the following error while visiting a website on a Citrix XenApp server:

I tried adding the site to the Trusted Sites List and adding the url to the Per Site Privacy list:

But this didn’t work, but I noticed that the site was “flickering” a lot so I suspected that HDX Flash Acceleration was the problem.

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I needed to login as root on a Linux based virtual appliance to do some troubleshooting. In my case the appliance was running Suse Linux Enterprise.

I booted the VA using the Ubuntu Live CD and opened a Terminal. Then I used the cfdisk tool (sudo cfdisk /dev/sda) to view the partitions:

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